Yup the young and healthy would do very well with a bare bones catastrophe plan. It’s the rest of us that are in trouble.
The effort to separate us into various constituencies based on current health and age only works to the advantage of the very rich. Any insurance plan, at its most basic definition, is a plan to manage the risks of its members. Even young and healthy people are subject to health risks. I was a young and healthy 30-year old when I was diagnosed with T1D. Any of us are exposed to common every-day accidents like falling or cutting ourselves.
Parsing the population into smaller and smaller sub-groups in order to “benefit” the healthier is a con job that primarily benefits the insurance companies. We all face similar health risks and as we age our health history unfolds. Why should we penalize people simply because more of their health story is now known? I believe that is capricious and cruel.
Insurance works best with the largest possible pool of participants. Medicare for all is the ultimate solution to this problem and I am continually confounded that a first-world country like ours cannot easily come to that conclusion politically. In this case, the manipulations of the so-called free market will never serve us well. We need to cut ourselves loose from the economic parasites that plague our current health care system.
We are smarter than this. We need to see that each of our health needs are actually everyone’s health needs. As the late Paul Wellstone once said, “We all do better when we all do better.”
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Well spoken. I miss Paul Wellstone.
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Well I was feeling a bit worried until I saw this.
Unfortunately, I honestly think there are more than a few in this country who actually believe this…& Many more who just don’t care.
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This guy is my Representative, unfortunately. He’s cares only about making his corporate and church overlords happy. I’ve tried to talk to him about these kinds of issues, and he literally laughed and said “you’re not one of my real constituents” and just walked away.
I saw a comment from one of his “real” constituents earlier concerning his responses to her calls & letters. The absolute stupidity would be laughable, except it’s scary as hell.
I don’t understand how medicare for all became a partisan issue. Richard Nixon was apparently for it, it was the one government program Margaret Thatcher didn’t dare dismantle as I’ve heard Christopher Hitchens say, and no party up here no matter how “conservative” would ever propose eliminating it.
My suggestion to this issue is; Vote them out! But the problem is that no one ever does it, and keeps putting the same fools back in office. Ask your politician what kind of health care he/she gets by being your Congressional representative? As @David49 pointed out, they ALL have the Cadillac Plan for life. Just like when Dick Cheney moved to the head of the line for a heart transplant while others that desperately need organs continue to wait, and die waiting. Oh, and BTW did you ever see a poor politician run for office? I never have in my lifetime. Set term limits and Vote their bums out!
[RANT - Yes, but one of the key reasons why the same fools get back into office is because the process of setting district boundaries (aka, gerrymandering) has been hijacked so that our representatives select the voters in their district, as opposed to voters selecting their representative. The next step is to establish extra-constitutional rules that only allow votes to come up when only the majority party is needed to pass them. “Who needs stinking bi-partisanship?”, is the new governing philosophy.
The biggest benefit(?) to what’s happening is the galvanizing of the opposition. The problem is the attacks are occurring on so many fronts that it’s hard to coalesce around a single issue and get it solved intelligently. /RANT}
My overall feelings are not very hopeful. I believed the conventional wisdom when the ACA was first passed. That was the bill wasn’t perfect, but together Americans of all stripes and parties would develop compromise “fixes” to improve the bill over time. Instead, the plan appears to be one of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It will be done over the next three years so that the full impact won’t be felt until after the 2020 elections.
YogaO, I value your opinions! This “so called - American Health Care Act” is the product of a group of politicians that opposed the Affordable Care Act for the past seven years. This group was jealous because one political party at least got some kind of health care in place. Was it perfect? As @YogaO also pointed out, by all means NO, the ACA wasn’t, but it was a start. So instead of putting some pride aside, and working together this healthcare act became the political football it is because someone wanted their brand name on the Bill. When you have a political party say from day one that their sole objective was to get rid of Obama, and his ACA is a very poor way to want to work together. Politicians will do what ever to get re-elected they are not for the people they were elected to represent, but instead to the people that will line their pockets.
Everyone saw what happened in the 2010 elections. They say history repeats itself, so I’m hoping the bums that support this new AHCA are also ushered out of the House of Representatives this time around. Ask these folks if they had diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc, and all other pre-existing conditions that they will now have to pay a lot more for in their health care premiums if their state so dictates it. So I ask how is this a better health care plan for the people? Scary! This is really about big business - the insurance companies, and their powerful lobbyists that dictate to the people what care you should have instead of your medical professional.
The irony is that the ACA wasn’t a particularly “liberal” plan—it’s not the single payer the left would have actually advocated for (and what Hillary Clinton was trying for back in the 90s). It’s actually the Mitt Romney plan he enacted in MA, which is why it’s still very much intertwined with the insurance companies. The GOP didn’t like it mostly because they weren’t the ones to enact it and it was a useful railing point against Obama and the Democrats. I’m sure plenty of them would have been behind it if only they could have taken credit for it.
And yeah, I’m hopeful this kind of thing helps take the Senate back from the GOP, but, like @YogaO says, I’m not optimistic about the House, mostly because gerrymandering may have made that all but impossible. People may have to take action on local levels to fix that before they can on national ones.
Indeed!
As just one example we have the “individual mandate” that was railed upon by everyone in the GOP when it was included as part of the ACA. Well, the individual mandate was a concept developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. It was supported by none other than GOP senators, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett until the ACA passed … oy veh!
I’m in the same boat Shadow. I also have another serious disease, but it’s very cheap to control. Warfarin “AKA rat poison” is only 7 dollars a month at Wally World. I pay another 200 dollars a year for test strips for my home-tester and all is good. That is until the Warfarin stops working and I need 1400 dollars a month worth of Lovenox injections. I hope the bill does not pass the senate. But only time will tell.
Medicare came out the Johnson Administration’s Great Society legislation. Like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the opposition party fought hard against them during their formation and despised them in the years since, especially as the American people started to use them.
Before FDR’s Social Security Act in 1935 and Johnson’s Medicare in 1964, old age years were feared by many as a time of poverty with little access to medical care, a time of valued elders becoming a burden on the next generation.
It’s ironic that the original writers of Medicare envisioned, even back in the middle '60’s, that Medicare would soon be extended to all age groups. Medicare has always been a partisan issue and Medicare for all is as well. It shouldn’t be, but it is. A large majority of Americans look favorably on Medicare.
I was diagnosed T1D as a small child and grew up terrified of ever having any gaps in insurance. Education and a stable job was my priority, to the exclusion of relationships and any kind of “fun” young adulthood. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stay continuously insured and hope I’m able to maintain that. I’m hopeful my insurance options will continue to provide strong coverage (they did prior to ACA) and I’m also trying to remain hopeful that as the bill passes through the senate, it will experience a number of revisions that will make the proposal more reasonable and balanced. Worst case scenario, this might only be in place for a few years until the changing of the guards and a new “repeal and replace” is proposed?
Fair enough, the funniest (or saddest) thing to me was during the “tea party” days when people would be holding protest signs that said things like “keep the government’s hands off my medicare”! Not surprised a majority of Americans are for medicare, single payer is the only system that works fairly for everyone (and it’s a lot less administrative hassle too).
I almost think that is a “middle-case scenario,” if such a thing exists. Worst case might be this passes the Senate as is and is signed into law by Trump; many states move quickly to remove minimum coverage requirements in their states; many employers choose new plans for their employees with rock-bottom coverage from one of those states in order to lower their costs; Americans vote like Americans vote (and some Americans don’t vote because…) and the GOP gets more seats in 2018. This becomes the new normal, and we diabetics become not just second-class citizens (even more than we already are), but experience the old reality:
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Wealthy diabetics have access to all the tools many of us now have;
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Poor diabetics die in misery if they can’t figure out how to use Walmart insulin (or it just doesn’t work for them).
Maybe that is the worst case scenario: many of us end up back on the old insulins and try to figure out how that all works while struggling to get test strips that we can afford.
I can scarcely believe that our country, based on the ideals of egalitarianism as stated in the Declaration of Independence, would be on the verge of passing a law such as the AHCA.
Make no mistake the purpose of this law is to eliminate the ACA taxes which fall mostly on those making more that 250K. The rest of the often stated reasons for getting rid of the ACA are a smokescreen.
It’s easy to see that health care inflation is on an unsustainable course and yet neither party has proposed anything that will seriously address this. Instead of this plutocrat friendly law we should start with the addressing the cost of prescription drugs and then use the money saved as a down payment on a system for universal healthcare.
Real reform starts at the ballot box. When folks like Rep. Raul Labrador are voted out constructive change can begin to happen.
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NO - I am not satisfied with the House bill. Affordability has not and is not addressed. IMO “cruel and unusual punishment” is that the annual cost of Premiums and Deductibles often exceed the annual cost of Shelter (home). Those with employer provided don’t realize that in reality they are paying for the increased costs as their paycheck does not increase correspondingly.
I believe in Free Choice of WHAT and IF I purchase something and not mandates of ‘you must buy’.
Call your Senator. Repeatedly. Text 50409 and follow the prompts to contact your representatives. It is easy and quick. They may end up taking away good insurance, but they will do it over my repeated calls, texts, fax and emails. Do SOMETHING
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